Red Hat will no longer provide the office software suite LibreOffice in new versions of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system. The company also says it contributes less to the development of LibreOffice for Fedora.
Red Hat says it will spend less work on desktop applications like LibreOffice and instead prioritize ‘refinements’ for RHEL for Workstation users. For example, the company wants to focus on improving WayLand and expanding HDR support. For this reason, the office software package is no longer supported from the next RHEL version, 10. It is not known when that version will be available.
However, Red Hat will continue to release security patches for the existing versions of LibreOffice in RHEL 7, 8 and 9 in the near future. The team will also perform a number of upstream fixes so that LibreOffice can be used as a Flatpak.
The team goes on to write that this “limits our ability to maintain LibreOffice in Fedora,” but the company declined to elaborate. It is therefore not clear whether LibreOffice will remain available for that Linux distro in the future. The team states that anyone is free to take over the maintenance of the rpm and Flatpak versions of the open source office suite in Fedora, but that this will involve a lot of work.
